I'm not scared

Cause I know there's something out there waiting for me

And I swear that I'll find it someday, just wait and see

I don't care that you call me crazy

I can't stay cause I need room to breathe

There's nothing left to say, better sorry than safe

We live in a world where we are constantly told what to do. Our families have some expectations that they expect us to live up to. We need an education and a job and a part from that they might expect us to start thinking about getting a family of our own. And if we choose not to we are told that it’s time that we grow up. I think it’s not about me not being grown up. In fact I think I am more grown up than a lot of people. I’m not scared of doing things on my own and it doesn’t matter if that means moving to the other side of the world. I’ll take the challenge. Tell me when you have grown enough to leave your comfort zone?

The kind of reaction I’ve had lately when I’ve realised how old I am is: Twenty-four is fucking young! And my standard question when people tell me that I am getting too old for this is: I’m not getting any younger. And that is fucking true! So if not now, when? Should we really settle for never? I think there are three kinds of people: The ones who jumps, the ones who just needs a little push and the ones who doesn’t even make it to the edge. And I belong to the one that jumps, because for me life’s too boring and depressed if I don’t. However we are not programmed to reach happiness in the same kind of ways. But everyone should do what they think they will regret if they don’t and no one should just settle with something because it’s easier or because it’s what is expected of you.

I’m sick of listening to people’s thoughts on how I should live my life. We don’t enjoy the same things so it’s pretty obvious that we don’t want the same things out of life. I don’t dream about buying a house and settling down to start a family. In fact what I want out of life at the moment is quite the opposite. I don’t want to be tied down with a mortgage and a house in a city that I don’t even want to live in with kids that I don’t even want and with a car that I can’t afford. So the question is: why should I strive towards that? It’s pretty easy to see why my family might think this is the right reason, they don’t know anything else. They’ve never had a different life and maybe not even the desire to want anything else. And maybe they just don’t understand why I don’t want the same things as they wanted when they were my age, because it was what made them happy.

I see a lot of people my age tied down with a family and a house and I think it’s great they are living their dreams, but a part of me think it’s a shame that they didn’t just take a year out to see something before they got tied down to charter holidays by the pool with screaming kids. But maybe that is me not understanding them.

I’ve said it before and I am going to say it again. I am restless and I can’t help it. But I’m just a person who needs to get out there and discover something new. I love to have a permanent place to stay, but I just don’t like being there for too long. Recently I decided to postpone my move to Australia and booked at three-week surf camp in Bali instead. I am going on December 26^th which means that I will be there for New Year’s Eve and I am already pretty-fucking-over-the-moon-excited about it. And of course I am flying solo! 

Am I brave enough?

Am I strong enough?

To follow the desire

That burns from within

To push away my fear

To stand where I'm afraid

I have a mind that is changing directions all the time. And this year I have changed my mind regarding my future three times. I mean it’s sometimes just such a tough decision and you don’t really want to be making the wrong one, but I guess you just gotta do what you gotta do – no regrets. I went from not wanting to keep studying to wanting to keep studying and my latest decision is that I don’t want to study any further. I’m sick of it and it’s hanging far out of my throat. I think that this time I want a life, but what kind of life is it exactly that I want? I know that. I want to be a seasonal worker and that might not sound like dreams in many people’s eyes, but it is in mine as it will give me the space I need for my own interests as travelling and writing, and I’ll not be held up anywhere specific. This year I’ll be working one month at a fish factory in my home town. It’s my sixth season there and then three and a half month as a site-manager at the company where I did my internship, which I am very excited about as it is in my field of study. So that is four and a half months of work already settled. So how amazing could it be if I could do it like this every year and then just find another or two companies to work for during Winter and Spring? I wouldn’t even need an apartment and when there’s no work I could go travelling. Why should you not follow your dreams when there is nothing holding you back? I’m free as a bird and the world is so big and I want to see it. My plan of going to Australia is still ongoing – I am going next year and it’ll be the craziest thing I have ever done. One thing was to move to Ireland, but Australia is a bit further away.

The only thing that is really stopping people from going anywhere is the way they look upon themselves. They don’t think they are brave enough to do it and it’s a shame because everyone is capable, you just got to jump the gun. I’ve heard it a lot of times it’s brave of you to do this. Especially when I moved to Ireland. So many people told me that they thought it was very brave of me to leave everything for the unknown and that they would never be able to do so. But to me it’s not so much about being brave it is more about what I have to do. Sometimes you just got to close your eyes and walk.

Recently I went to an info meeting with EDU about studying in another country. I have had a troubled mind about whether to study abroad or to just study online. The education in itself is the same; however the amount of money is the big difference. Studying abroad is expensive as hell and it will result in taking a loan while studying online will be loan-free. I went to the info meeting to get a clearer picture of what I want to do when I am going to Australia. I had been playing with the thought of studying at an Australian University a bit and the thought of it seemed fun. The fact that you would be able to make friendships easier because you’d be thrown together with people from day one was quite attractive to me. I tried moving to Ireland on my own and I tried to develop friendships there. It was very superficial and it wasn’t until I had to return to Denmark that I felt I was finally moving forward. I am great at being by myself but you see so much more with people around you. However I didn’t really feel foreign in Ireland because even though the friendships where superficial I felt welcome.

The info meeting cleared my mind quite a lot about whether to go for the university life or the online life. At the meeting I learnt the difference between me and other people. When asked why people wanted to study abroad most people said something like:

“I want to experience a new way of being educated”

“I want to study at another university”

“I have heard great things about universities”

“My first priority is a great university”

University, university, university… I could care less about universities and that is the difference and that is what made me realise that spending hell loads of money on a university that I don’t even care about will be downright stupid. It shocked me how few mentioned the fact that they wanted to experience another culture as their first priority. Instead it seemed like something that would just be a bonus side-effect to studying at a foreign university. The person responsible for the meeting also said something about a Buddy-Programme universities offers to foreigners. It’s a program where the foreigner will be assigned to a local who will show the person around. But it shocked me when she mentioned that it was a great idea because you got to see where the locals go. It had me thinking that if you are not assigned that programme if studying abroad then you will not get to see the local places and meet the locals. And that is one of the problems I always have with foreigners. They tend to stick to other foreigners and for me it just seems like a lot of waste to go to another country if you just hang out with foreigners. I would hate to go to Australia and just befriend other Scandinavians. If I want to talk to Danish people I can just stay in Denmark. The foreigners in Denmark are just the same. They live together and do everything together. They don’t even try to integrate. They go to museums and do other tourist-like stuff where I am different. I want to come back from a trip and tell people about a stupid tree I saw in a stupid forest where no one was around.

Studying at universities I realised that you will be put together with other foreigners and based on that and other things I made up my mind; and that is to stay away from universities and hopefully stay away from foreigners. I am going to study online and start from scratch just the way I did when I moved to Mullingar. It’s always easy to take the easy way out, but I just don’t think it will give me the satisfaction I want from another country and culture. So I am going to take the tough and lonely path again and hopefully get something beautiful out of it. It’s so much more challenging and satisfying when you make it work all by yourself. 

New year, new start & new adventures.

So my love for Denmark lasted for a few months. And I have once again begun looking for new places to go to satisfy my needs and desires. And I already set Australia as my new goal. I want to move to Sydney.  I have realised that being stuck at the same place for long is freaking me out. I guess some people call it wanderlust; I just call it freaking out. I'm a restless person and I realise that shaping my life to fit my needs is a bit difficult to master, but still it is what I need to do and  I will not stop before I find a way to balance everything. I guess stopping is the only thing that can keep you from your dreams.  

Luckily I have already made a few plans for what is going to happen in 2015. First of all I’m going to Jönköping, Sweden, for a week around Easter with my family. Apart from that I have for a month or so been planning a road trip with a few of my friends in the summer. And our plans are finally being to shape as we have just rented a RV, which will be the first time for me to go on vacation in one of those, let alone drive one. We have rented it for two weeks and we are going to start in Germany and then make our way through The Netherlands, Belgium and to France, where we will be watching Tour de France one of the days. Then we will move on to Luxemburg and then back to Germany and then we will probably head back to Denmark. The route is not final and I believe we will take is as we go and stop to sleep at Stellplatzer.

The day we get back from our road trip I am heading for another vacation with my family on a Danish island called Ærø. We have rented a cottage, which we have rented twice before when I was a kid, so it’s going to be good to get back there and see how things look. And if they look like I remember.

For August, September, October and half of November I will be working like I did last year in Sweden, Denmark and Scotland. And apart from all of that I finish my AP degree in July, so I guess there are loads of things to look forward to in 2015 and it will most likely be a busy year. I am just stoked that something is happening, and there’s still place to get a few extra things in.

A recap of last year’s destinations:

Ireland, Czech Republic, Germany (Lübeck, Schwerin), Sweden (Malmö, Gothenburg, Karlstad, Stockholm), UK (London, Birmingham, Manchester x2, Edinburgh), Morocco (Marrakech)

I've also got another way to enter this blog by www.apriliabrun.com

Danmark mit 

fædreland.

Definition of fantasy in English:

NOUN (plural fantasies)

[COUNT NOUN] A fanciful mental image, typically one on which a person often dwells and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes.

All my life I have lived in a fantasy; a fantasy about moving to another country. I was dwelling. It’s all I ever wanted because I thought anything could be better than Denmark. And I did. I moved to Ireland and it was great! I loved being in Ireland and I discovered a new person hidden deep inside of me. An independent person. I have never needed people around me so even though I didn’t know anyone I quickly felt home. I felt at home because strangers greeted me in a way they have never done before. I felt at home because when I was walking in the countryside people would wave even though they had no clue who I was.  I loved that going for a walk would always make me smile. I loved Ireland so much that I might even move back one day.

But it also made me realise that I love Denmark. I truly love Denmark and I am deeply proud of being a Dane. Before I wasn’t, I would do anything to escape it; in fact I just wanted to be English. That was my innermost dream! However it is funny how things work out, because I no longer want to be English. I want to be Danish. I don’t even like England anymore. Working in London for a month made me realise that English people have a different morality; one that I don’t like. In fact my love for the Danish nation has become so strong, that I find it hard to believe that there are any greater people out there.

They say that when you go to a foreign country the national feeling towards your own country gets stronger and I agree. I just never thought it would get so strong that I ended up finding it hard to see the good things in people if they are not from Denmark. I never thought I would get so negative towards foreign countries. Not all foreign countries though. I like the Scandinavian Countries and Germany, and the weirdest thing is that I always hated Germany. I also started to like Poland. I met some Poles and it made me realise that Poles and Danes are not that far from each other. Once I would judge Poles for stealing our bicycles (including mine), but now I want to go there. I want to get to know Poland.

I used to dislike Romanians because they would come here and steal our jobs. But I’ve come to know them because I have worked with a lot of them and they are really nice people. And I don’t judge them anymore; they come here in search of something better, just like we leave in search of something better.

It’s like my world has been turned upside-down. Everything I used to love and want has become something I could never dream of and all that I used to hate is now something I desire.

However I still enjoy going on vacation in foreign countries even though they are not like Denmark. I like expanding my horizon and maybe that is why I’ve learnt that Denmark is a goddamn good country. Sometimes you just need to see something else to realise what you’ve got. So maybe sometimes we should let go of our fantasies and instead open our eyes to what has been in front of us all the time.

Somethings are hard to understand…

---

This year has been one of the best years in my life, and most definitely the worst. It’s weird to have to process and live with the fact that something good and amazing is going on while you have the worst time of your life. And how can you even allow yourself to be happy? But the answer is easy even though it seems quite tough. Answer: you have to! Even though you want to stop the time and just go back you can’t dwell in the past. The recipe to be happy is to deal with what is happening and not stop living. You have to keep going on and maybe be a bit egoistic about it. One thing I have learnt about grieving is that everyone does it differently. When I saw my mother on the hospice I cried for two days. But then it stopped.  I remember that I felt like the way I was grieving was wrong, because in some way I acted like nothing was wrong. Sometimes my grandmother would get up from where she was sitting and go directly to me and just look at me as if she was trying to get a reaction out of me. It made me feel like what I was doing was wrong because I just didn’t cry in front of her. My grandmother had tears in her eyes all the time as in contrast to me who had a smile on my face. But of course I wasn’t happy. One of the most important things I have learnt is that when something like this happens you are thrown out into something that you have never experienced before and you just don’t know how to react. You have an idea about how you should react, but it’s most likely not the way you do it. It’s like all your feelings have been lying neatly in a drawer and then all of a sudden someone has made a huge mess in it and you can’t find anything. I have learnt that there is no right or wrong and that you cannot judge people by the way they react. I have also learnt that people most likely doesn’t even notice how you are reacting, because they are too busy thinking with their own reactions. It sounds self-centred but in a time like this it’s somewhat exactly what you have to be. Sometimes I would wake up at night not knowing where I really was. Of course that could be because I had been sleeping at different hotels in different cities every week for three months, but it could also be because of everything going on around me.

After my mum passed away we took her fingerprint and both my sister-in-law and I got a unique necklace with her fingerprint. And I am so happy that this has been made because it will feel like having a piece of her with me all the time. It’s a matter of what you choose to do the day after someone passes away that can change a lot, because you only have a limited. Like for instance we only had a limited time to get my mother’s fingerprint once she would be buried it would be too late. I also helped wash my mum and dress her and give her makeup on when she was dead. She had asked me to help with it and to be honest I didn’t know how I would feel about it. But I am so happy I did it. It was what she wished and it also comforts me that I know it was done properly and that she looked beautiful when the closes family came to say their final goodbyes. And it really is nothing to be afraid of.  Some people would not feel comfortable doing it, but I can really only recommend it, because it is very soothing a relieving in some way.

Maybe people feel the same way in these situations as I did or maybe they feel completely different. I believe it’s individual and in some way really personal. It’s fascinating how life can be so fragile and still we are able to heal ourselves without even understanding what is going on.

---

…and perhaps they should never be understood.

When everything falls apart…

---

What better way to end a year with a recap of what has happened in the last twelve months. However sometimes a recap is not really what we want because it reminds us of painful things. 2014 started better than any year could have. The previous year I had finally decided on following my dreams and goals (some of them) and it had led me to a nice but cold one bedroom flat in Ireland. I was home for Christmas where my grandparents on my mother’s side came to my parent’s house to celebrate Christmas with us. What we didn’t know back then was that it would be the last year we would all be able to celebrate Christmas together. We did not know about the tragedy lying ahead of us. For New Year’s Eve me, my brother and his wife went to my parent’s house to spend the last day of 2013 together and celebrate the beginning of a new year together as well. A new year that would end totally different from how it started.

In May my mother began to feel different. She got dizzy and her sight was sometimes slurry. She went to the doctor for a check where they discovered some disturbing news. She was diagnosed with cancer and it was spread all over her body like Nutella on a piece of bread. I don’t think I have ever believed in people when they say their knees goes weak. But I discovered it the day my father told me it was cancer. I don’t think I felt my legs at all and somehow everything around me became distant. I was at work when he told me (sometimes I work at the same place as my parents) and I don’t know how I continued through the day. Whenever I thought about it I would burst into tears and when I would be lying in my bed I wouldn’t fall asleep without crying. However things got better as I got used to the thought and when I started having a bit of hope. I went with my mother to radiation treatment and I was taught about the whole process. She had radiation treatment four times, which caused her to lose her hair. But it was just hair, right?

In between the whole thing I had to find a place to do my internship which had to start in August. I was lucky to find a spot in a company that travelled around in Europe. Both my parents knew that this was what I wanted and my mother was so happy because she thought the opportunity was so great and I think she already had visions about me working. I told them that I wouldn’t go if she would have less than three months left, where they assured me she had more than three months left. Maybe she would even live for years – no one could say anything for sure. They told me that they wanted me to go and in some way I think my mother was much more excited about this internship than I was; so off I went.

After a few weeks my dad called me while I was in Stockholm and told me to come home as soon as possible because my mother had been hospitalised and that he was afraid that she wouldn’t have much time left. At that time she had started puking and couldn’t hold anything down. So in the end she had felt so bad that my dad had arranged for her to be hospitalised. A few days after the phone call I came back to Aalborg where my brother picked me up at the airport and took me to the hospital to visit my mother. And to be honest as I am writing this right now I don’t remember how I felt when I saw her or how I felt before I saw her. Maybe in some way I didn’t think her time had come just yet. Of course I cried when I went to bed because a life without my mother was a life that I could never imagine going through. I was only home for a few days before I had to go to Copenhagen and upon my departure my dad told me that I shouldn’t expect to see my mother again. I knew it was tearing at him but I hadn’t expected that statement and especially not because my mother had left the hospital the same day as when I had to leave, because she was feeling much better. I refused to believe it and even though it should be wrong I was so happy to be leaving for Copenhagen.

While I was happy about seeing my mother again being home was miserable. No matter where I went and who I visited they were all affected by my mother’s sickness and it felt like it was everything they could talk about. And to be honest I felt bad enough about not being there for my mother that it made me feel even guiltier listening to everyone talking about how they couldn’t sleep at night, when I was in a new town every week having fun and smiling. It made me want to escape from all of them and just go back to the tour where I could be myself. I hate that I wanted to run away and I hate that what I did was in fact running away when I should probably have been more supportive.

Six weeks later when I was in Manchester my dad called again. This time he told me that my mother had started talking about weird things and seeing things that weren’t there. From when I left for Copenhagen and till he called me in Manchester my mother had been feeling well. But one night everything had changed in just three hours. She had gone from feeling good to being delirious and hardly being able to move in just three hours. When I received that phone call I knew I had to get home and that it had to be quick. I was supposed to take the train to Newcastle where I would be picked up in a car and take the ferry to Amsterdam, where we would drive to Denmark. That was a long trip and even though I knew I had to get home as soon as possible I wanted to go with the rest on the long trip back to Denmark, because the longer I stayed away the longer I could pretend everything was fine back home. I could create my own world where my mother wasn’t sick. However my brother booked me a flight ticket for the next morning and off I went on the longest flight in my life.

My flight was going from Manchester to Amsterdam and Amsterdam to Aalborg. When I was sitting on the plane from Manchester to Amsterdam I had a hard time trying not to cry. It seemed that no matter what I was thinking about it would lead to my mother and at that moment reality had kicked in and I just wanted to get home as quick as possible. In Amsterdam I boarded the next plane and when we were 15 minutes away from landing at Aalborg Airport the plane got cancelled and had to fly back to Amsterdam because of an indication failure. Never have I ever felt the time stand still the way it did back to Amsterdam. I was silently crying while trying to make sure that no one else noticed. When we arrived in Amsterdam I learnt through my brother that I had been booked on a new plane the following morning; I just couldn’t wait till morning. I found the nearest toilet where I locked myself in and just sat there crying till I could contain myself again. I went to the KLM help disk where my brother had instructed me to go and tell them about my situation. His wife had called to KLM and they had assured her that they would get me on a flight the same evening, but I had to explain my situation to the people at the help disk. When I came to the help disk I was not able to say anything. My tears were literally streaming down my face and I was sniffing uncontrollable. All I ever got to tell them was that I had to get home and it had to be the same day. Luckily the woman understood that I had a difficult situation at home and someone actually had to be “kicked off” the plane in order for me to get a seat.

I came home and the day after my mother was transferred to a hospice. It was so good to see her again even though she was not herself at all. She had trouble speaking and she was sleeping most of the time. I was supposed to go to Italy on the 9th of November and all the time I had it in the back of my mind. I kept telling myself that I would see if she got worse and if she didn’t I kept telling people that I would still go to Italy. Even though I was home and I knew how everything was going to end I still wanted to run away. I just wanted to escape and forget everything. However on the 6th of November I knew that no matter what I would never be able to leave her like that. On November the 8th my mother died in the morning. I don’t quite remember how I felt that morning either. I wasn’t crying much, only a little. A part of me was relieved that she had finally got peace.

---

… we still have to keep on going